A Shockingly Insightful Film - The Electric House a Buster Keaton Film
In Buster Keaton’s film, The Electric House, the director effectively uses a lot of filming techniques that are fairly mature for his contemporary. The film itself functions as a comment on the demands of the people in his time for new gadgetry and the subsequent elevation in status. This demand is as prevalent as ever, thus giving cross generational validity.
This comedy, as with any good comedy, is used as a method of critique. Laziness of the American people and their need for products to allow them to sloth in peace, gadgets made for the house such as the escalator, the train food server and the dishwasher. The replacement of various tasks once held by the help also conveys the fear of many Americans at the time; that the industrialization would eventually render manual labor obsolete.
This comedy in the film represents a real life horror for the American people possibly contributing to the eeriness of the film. As eeriness comes from what we fear subconsciously being laid out in front of us.
Or these gadgets are cumulatively just a good excuse to have a train do some tricks for us as with the “Cinema of Attractions” idea posed by Tom Gunning.
The fact that these various inventions are so easily made into a dangerous world of terror expresses a fear that with the over simplification of activities comes a dichotomous over complication in which the owners of this fantastic home are worse off than their assumedly less advanced neighbors. Yet another luddite mentality being conveyed through this spoof-like macabre film.
In regards to editing, I particularly liked the use of match on action shots specifically regarding the escalator malfunctions. Whomever the unlucky soul may be that finds them selves on the escalator during its malfunction is shown flying out of the window from the interior, then immediately coming out from an outside perspective. This technique doesn’t feel noticeable as it is prolific in cinema today, but at the time was quite cutting edge.
For these various reasons I enjoyed the film. Simple concepts converge to a critique in a economical way.